Manit Sriwanichpoom has just bagged some big game in Africa and, just as you might expect unless you're a hunter, it's not a pretty sight.

Best known for turning his artist buddy Sompong Thawee into the "Pink Man" for a set of photos that skewed city life, Manit has now gone on "Safari" in the former Dark Continent and come back no less awash in absurdity - and melancholy.

Manit has opened his new gallery, Kathmandu, with the photographs he took of stuffed animals on display at the National Museum of Kenya.

The still-lifes were taken in Nairobi last year, where Manit was conducting a three-week workshop for the Oslo Photo Art School.

"There are more and more tourists in Kenya now, hungry for anything exotic, and lots of animal-figurine souvenirs," he says. "I was always being accosted by touts wanting me to go on a safari tour. But to me the word 'safari' conjures up visions of white big-game hunters. What they offer is designed for tourists in a colonial fantasy. I feel uncomfortable with that perspective of Africa."

 Manit instead went to the museum, but there he only found evidence of hunting's cruelty being covered up with paint and poses. He decided he'd better get it on film - all the lifeless grotesques set against imitation landscapes in a leering taunt at reality.

"I saw these stuffed animals in the museum, on display in dimly lit rooms, and they were so sad, with their glass eyes and the painted backdrops of the African bush," says Manit, 45.

"They were killed, then stuffed and posed as living animals in glass-boxed painted jungles. It's laughable that so much effort has been put into recreating an illusion of life."

The 16 photographs - all 50 by 50 centimetres - illustrate lifelessness. There's a former vulture and an ex-lion, a rhino, a duiker, a leopard, a klipspringer and something called a lechwe, or at least stitched and glued parts of these animals that once galloped and leapt and prowled across the African plains.

And there is Homo erectus too - our own forebear - or something like him.

Nor could Manit resist photographing the dining room of the Nairobi YMCA, where pictures of wild animals keep an eye on the human food queues.

"This is my African safari, a safari in a city museum," he says. "Look closely at the eyes of the lions - they're surrealistic and fantastic. The harder we try to fake life, the more pathetically dead it is."

Manit, an erstwhile photojournalist, hasn't abandoned his nine-year-old "Pink Man" series, a satire on consumerism's feeding frenzy.

 "Safari" is another of his series on museums. In recent years he's photographed human and animal models in museums in Cuba and France. "I'm interested in the way museums in every country portray their people's origins and civilisation and local species. To me a museum is a propaganda tool to promote the individual's identity and advanced development."

In 2000, his "Bangkok in Black and White" show featured elephants roving about the capital's chaotic streets.

One memorable shot had a tusker loping past a tuk-tuk that was stuck in traffic. The city's maddening incongruities were etched on the driver's face.

The elephant photos were on view again recently, at the Gwanju Biennale in South Korea. To accentuate the pachyderms' plight, Manit chained the photos together.

"Safari" continues until November 23 at Kathmandu, at 87 Pan Road near the Indian temple, off Silom Road. It's open daily except Monday from 11am to 7pm. Call (02) 234 6700.

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit

The Nation